OpenAI’s custom GPT Store is now open to all for free

OpenAI is making a number of its previously subscription-only features available to free users of ChatGPT, with the biggest being the ability to browse its GPT Store and use custom bots, said CTO Mira Murati during the company’s Spring update livestream today. The company also published today’s updates in a blog on its website.

The company opened its GPT Store to paid subscribers just four months ago on January 10th. The store lets ChatGPT Plus subscribers create their own chatbots, called GPTs, and share them. Some of the trending bots right now include an image-generating bot, a chatbot called Consensus that’s geared toward helping with scientific research, and a logo-making bot.

OpenAI said it would offer an engagement-based revenue sharing program for GPT builders — that started testing in March. But the audience for the bots has been limited due to the feature’s restriction to paying ChatGPT users.

Besides the GPT Store, Murati also announced GPT-4o, a multimodal “omnimodel” with chatbot, vision-based analysis, and live chat capabilities. The company also announced a desktop app for Macs (with a Windows version coming “later this year”) and said it’s updating the web UI for ChatGPT. Murati said the company wants users to be able to “focus on the collaboration with ChatGPT” and not the UI.

OpenAI is also giving free users the ability to upload files and photos for summary and analysis, search the web with ChatGPT, and use GPT-4 with memory of previous chats, all of which were previously subscription-locked.

Correction, May 13th: An earlier version of this article misstated which GPT Store features will be free. Free users can access custom GPTs, but they cannot create them.